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Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Rock Gardens Site Access -| Updated May 21, 2008 |-

UPDATE May 21, 2008After the community meeting last week there is now a blasting schedule for the Hamilton Extension site. Starting at the end of this month and for probably until end of July there will be blasting twice a day one between 10am and 11am and one between 2pm and 3pm. The remaining blasting is occurring quite close the the Gardens so you probably want to pay attention to any warning signals. The contractor and the project engineer are really keen to make sure they don't have another incident like Lowbird again.

As a reminder: The contractor has asked us to stay off the construction site as much as possible. Eventually there will be a side road that we can park on but its not quite built yet. For the time being you may want to park over in the campground or across the road in the rest area.UPDATE May 7, 2008

Lowbird residents had an some uninvited visitors last night courtesy of the blasting on the Hamilton Boulevard extension. See the article at the Yukon News the Whitehorse Star and the CBC. Blasting is suspended pending and investigation of the flying rocks.

On Monday May 5, 2008 the City, Equinox and us met with the contractor and the engineer in charge of the Hamilton Boulevard extension. We talked about access concerns as well as safety with blasting in the area. We also talked with the City and the contractor about putting up some signs in the area for parking as well as a schedule of City programs.

Access:

Soon a service road will be created on the west side of the extension (closest to the Airport). Climbers will be able to park there. There will be a limited amount of space so please car pool. Try not to park in the Yukon Gardens parking lot and access the Rock Gardens through there. The owner of the property is not climber friendly.

To get to the area walk along the tree line until you arrive at an obvious trail. Use that trail to access the Gardens. For obvious reasons cutting across the construction site is not a good idea. We'll post a map as soon as I whip one up.

Blasting and Safety:

Blasting is going on in the area until at least the end of this month. There is no set schedule however most blasting take place between 5pm and 7pm and the contractor will clear the area before a blast. In terms of rock stability, there is no sure fired way to determine the stability of the rock after blasting in the area. Use your judgment and watch for loose rock, flakes etc.

User Groups:

There seems to be a huge upswing in interest in climbing this summer - which is awesome! However this also means that there is added pressure on the crags, especially the Rock Gardens. A number of user groups in town such as the City and Equinox use the Rock Gardens for programs. In order to get people the most amount of climbing time we are working with the various user groups to post their program schedules here and hopefully at the trail head. That way we can work around everyone's schedule to get the most climbing in that we can. We hope to have that up in the next few days.

As usual if you have any questions or would like to know if blasting is scheduled for the day drop a line at climbyukon@gmail.com and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.

4 comments:

Hi there! I just stopped by this blog for the first time today and submitted the link to Urban Yukon (check it out at urbanyukon.com) so that other people can find out about it. :)

Just wanted to let you know, though, that a whole pile of your links don't work... or at least, they didn't work for me. The archives, labels, and even the header seem to refer to www.climbyukon.NET... which apparently doesn't exist...?